Days Of Innocence And Wonder is the third novel by award-winning, best-selling Australian author, Lucy Treloar. Even though it’s almost twenty years ago, the loss of her best friend and the belief that she failed her, still loom large in Till’s brain. When they were five, a man came to their special spot in the Brunswick kindergarten playground, and walked away with her friend, E.

In late 2021, when the lockdowns finally seem to be done with, and people are again out and about, Till (the name she has answered to since she was six) catches sight of someone who makes her uneasy enough to want to leave her parents’ home, to escape to the safety and anonymity of her car, to travel away from her home city. Her faithful black greyhound, Birdy comes along.

After some time travelling, sleeping in her car, and encounters with groups of homeless women, Till stumbles on Wirowie: “The main street was a ghost town, a film set with everyone gone, everyone dead, everyone forgotten, soon to arrive or recently departed, and everything left behind waiting, as unreal as that.”

She’s drawn to the defunct railway station, attracted by its architecture, its construction, and although “She was a city person and she’d moved to a ghost town, and the thought would not become more solid than that. But she felt more solid, like herself she supposed, though unfamiliar, not a person in costume. The sad growling anger that was part of her had moved off a little way, at least some of the time. She would not easily leave a place that had done that.”

She tries to stay under the radar, but of course she is noticed, her reception ranging from genuine welcome, to wary, to downright hostile. Her squatting in the station’s buildings becomes more, as she begins to repair and restore. She explores, she runs, she sings, and she makes friends, although not all her encounters are friendly. She works in the shop in nearby Oororoo, and sings at the Peterborough pub: she gets involved. “She’d started out so free and easy and now she was making lists and dreaming.”


But then, a series of incidents that instil fear into the women of the community, and Till realises: “Outsiders had brought nothing but destruction and sadness to this place. She had to include herself. She saw that now. Benign intent was no excuse, yet people cared about her, the very people she had brought harm to.”

In a story that examines the meaning of home and belonging, and coping with fear, grief and loss, Treloar also touches on domestic violence the abuse of power, homeless older women, and society’s tacit acceptance of the denial of responsibility for the theft of Country from Australia’s First Nations.

“…a mirror at her great-grandmother’s, which was foxed with age and small, and poorly lit except late in the afternoon when the sun hit it. It gave the illusion of revealing everything important about a person, and was inherently deceptive as all mirrors are in their way. Tilt the angle and anyone or anything might appear or disappear. It’s what the colonisers did: altered the angle, held themselves in a kind light.”

Readers familiar with Treloar’s work might expect gorgeous prose, and they won’t be disappointed. Below, some examples of her exquisite, breathtaking descriptions (so hard to limit the quotes): “It was just past dawn. the faintest haze hung in the air despite it being so dry, and the sun rushed across the grasses and red dirt, and the sky seemed to rise from the horizon like a flung sheet – blue silk, faded at the selvedge, billowing free” and “Ruined houses lay everywhere, empty-mouthed and hollow-eyes, sometimes fenced off and distant.”

A car yard: “The ancient cars were butted up like stonework and fabulously lit by the late sun. it turned their ice cream colours – duck egg blue, sherbet pink, dove grey, lilac rust – luminous and otherworldly. Their curious curved bonnets and sculptural prows made them seem more creature (an eagle, a tapir, a rhinoceros) than machine. They faced the road as if waiting to see what was coming or what show might be about to begin” and “When she sang, she mostly put on someone else, as if that other person was a coat, a suede jacket – vintage, something like that – which never felt like her: her size, her colour, her material, her look.”

“Talking with Tundra sometimes felt less like conversation than witnessing the world sliced in a different way, receiving something, absorbing something: knowledge, maybe insight…” and “The light all around was so thick it seemed as solid as water, swaying above the ground, trembling within bowls of trees, pouring along dry creek beds.” Treloar’s latest is beautifully crafted, topical, thought-provoking and incredibly moving: a must-read.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Macmillan Australia.